Other topics that Kiryu addresses in the letter include Square Enix’s future investment strategies, comic publishing plans, current development pipeline, and thoughts about how Square Enix can expand its video game publishing efforts. However, Kiryu’s thoughts on AI technology have understandably dominated the conversation about the letter due to both their controversial nature and the ways they mimic the tone of the rest of Kiryu’s strategies and statements.
Before we dive into all of that, though, there are a couple of pieces of context worth keeping in mind. First off, this letter certainly reads like it’s largely intended for the company’s various investors. Many companies publish letters to their investors this time of year, and those letters tend to be pretty…dry and focused on things that generally only excite that specific crowd. Furthermore, this is one of the first significant public statements that Kiryu has released since becoming Square Enix President in March 2023. His relative inexperience in that specific position makes these statements more interesting and could certainly impact his views on these topics in various ways.
Having said that, there are several things about Kiryu’s letter that will undoubtedly be concerning at best and horrifying at worst for many Square Enix fans as well as those who use the actions of such a major company as a compass for the direction the rest of the video game industry may be heading in.
For me, the saddest part of the letter is the section where Kiryu mentions Square Enix’s ongoing interest in “blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud.” Well, Kiryu’s predecessor (Yosuke Matsuda) previously argued that blockchain technology was going to be a big part of Square Enix’s future and the future of gaming, much to his eventual detriment. Yet, not only does Kiryu suggest that Square Enix needs to “optimize our resource allocations” to support some of those investments that remain socially controversial and fiscally unstable, but he does so in the same letter where he bullishly embraces the similarly controversial use of generative AI technology as a major part of the company’s future.
Mind you, the letter includes little mention of how that technology will practically be implemented to assist Square Enix’s developers, which is both a crucial piece of missing information and arguably the entire problem. In a letter seemingly intended to open the minds and wallets of investors everywhere, a vague mention of the vague benefits of vaguely defined AI technology is seen as something worth getting very excited about in the minds of people whose money and decisions will end up impacting the games we play and the lives of the people who make them.
Coming off of a year that saw widespread layoffs across the video game industry, it feels especially ignorant to suggest that the future of your cornerstone video game company will be based on technology that many fear will not only negatively impact job availability/quality within the industry but to do so in a letter that frustratingly brushes aside previously misplaced optimism in failed pieces of trendy volatile technology. Like other public proponents of generative AI, Kiryu suggests its initial implication will be used to “enhance our development productivity,” but that reference to using that technology to “create new forms of content for consumers” is a haunting reminder that the current success of even seemingly reasonable modern AI applications fuels the threat of AI-generated content on a massive scale.
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